A telephone call placed to a business organization commonly is handled by an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. The IVR system interacts with the caller via automated dialogs that present the caller with prompts that the caller responds to. The responses are automatically classified by the system (using automatic speech recognition, ASR) to determine how to handle the call. Some calls can be handled completely by automated responses of the IVR system, while other calls need to be referred to a human agent for completion.
To optimize the performance of an IVR system, it is helpful to record the individual telephone calls and analyze their details. But recording calls with multiple agent transfers as a single session in a hosted recording system is a problem. Depending on the type of transfer the calls could be dropped during a transfer. In order to do a complete end-to-end recording, a conventional IVR system has to do a bridge (trombone) transfer to the agents. This is expensive because it utilizes twice the telephony resources as would a simple blind transfer require.